Digital Footprint

What is a Digital Footprint?

A digital footprint is the trail of data that you leave on every place you go to on the internet. Websites you went and emails you sent can all be tracked down due to the digital footprint. Your online activity is constantly being monitored, and it's important to learn about the types of digital footprint.

There are two types of digital footprints:

Active

Active digital footprint refers to when users share the information themselves. This can be from filling out your social media information, your birth date, your occupation, relationship status, and a whole lot of other pieces of information. This type of digital footprint falls under active due to the user's own actions being the cause.

Passive

Passive digital footprint is when information of the user is collected without the user's knowledge.  Passive digital footprint can be seen during moments where websites collect data on how frequent a user visits their website, their address, and IP address. Social media apps are a well-known treading ground for passive digital footprint as apps like TikTok, Twitter, etc. will use your likes and what you look at to target specific content towards you.

Importance

A digital footprint can be very vital as it contains a lot of personal information. The problem with digital footprint is that it's relatively permanent. You will have very little control over what is done with the information once it's public. 

This information can be harmful to your image and could cause employers to pull out of recruiting you. Companies will look through your social media profiles as a background check to see if you qualify for the job. Your digital footprint is extremely important to your real life image in this sense. This is why it's always important to not share too much personal information to sites as that information can and will be used against you.

Some important factors to consider in order to limit your digital footprint:

• Limit the information shown on your public social media

• Delete unused/old email accounts

• Think before you click on any link/website

• Remove yourself from people search sites (i.e. Whitepages, Intelius, etc.)

"Your digital footprint is NOT important. DO NOT care about what you do on the internet. You will NOT have your information leaked. Be as RECKLESS as possible when browsing the internet and NEVER use VPN's." - CyberHater